Starwoven Cartography

Kei Raan kept his palms where the maps remembered him best: over the warm, glassy skin of the plotting console that smelled faintly of solder and something like rain on copper. The Arcadia Sprawl hung around the gas giant Veld like a necklace of battered mirrors and sodium lights, and from the observation porthole Kei could see the slow, blue breathing of the planet's storms. He had a habit of reading storms the way other people read faces. That morning the storms looked impatient.

The map under his hands was a delicate thing, no thicker than a prism, a lattice of light and tiny filaments that rearranged when he touched it. Kei's left eye toggled with a soft click; an augment flickered its display — catalogue overlays, traffic pings, old transit scratches. He traced lanes that were not on any public chart: whisper routes and forgotten waypoints he salvaged from derelicts and drowned archives. He called them hushways, but in the right hands they were roads. In the wrong hands they were prison bars.

'You're up early,' Corran said from where he sat, retying a boot the way someone retied old promises. Corran's voice could scrape a gasket and still sound like wind through hollow metal. He was an old pilot with a face like a weathered map, each line a story. He had taught Kei how to find lanes between lanes, how to listen to the hum that told where space had been molded and abandoned.

'No such thing as early when the lanes talk,' Kei answered, not looking away. He felt Corran's gaze like a compass. The older man had driven a scout through the West Reckoner a decade ago and brought back more than drift tales; he brought back a pattern, a rumor of a seam in the net that stitched the Lumen Gates together — a seam people called the Veil.

Corran's fingers hesitated over the rim of his tea. 'There's noise in the Gates,' he said quietly. 'Helion's sensors picked it up. Power fluctuations, subtle at first. Then a collapse along Lumen Node Seven. We lost three freighters overnight.'

Kei's lips tightened. A Gate collapse was not only a hazard; it was commerce, politics, desperation. If the Lumen Gates failed even in a handful of lanes, traffic would choke. Merchant houses would bribe. Pilots would be stranded. And some shadow somewhere would see a chance to bind the rest. He thought of the lattice under his hands and felt it twitch, like a pulse felt through bone.

'Anything else?' he asked.

'Someone's been asking about Corran's charts,' said Naia, from the doorway where she stood with a bag like a small machine and a grin that didn't match the worry under her eyes. 'Nice ones. Dangerous ones.'

Corran's jaw tightened. Outside, the Sprawl's public channels began to chime: advisories blinking red, half-formed rumors like moths around a lamp. Kei pinched the bridge of his nose until he saw the map blossom in a quiet flare. 'Then we'll do what we always do,' he said, though the map under his hands felt suddenly thinner. 'Patch the routes for people who can't pay the Directorate's tariffs.'

When Corran stood, he moved with the precision of someone who had listened to engines for three decades. He tapped a sequence into Kei's console and a small, cylindrical slot at the map's base opened with a soft sigh. Inside, wrapped in oily cloth, was a sliver of something older than the Sprawl: a band of carved alloy with a lattice of minute veins. Kei's fingers hovered.

'We don't keep it here,' Corran said. 'Not unless we want a Directorate cutter at our door within the hour.'

The band was warm, as if it had been held recently. Kei understood the warmth like someone hearing the tune to a lullaby; it was familiarity and danger braided together. He slid it back into place with trembling, half-closed fingers.

Corran inhaled. 'Sleep when the lanes quiet. I'm going to make rounds. Keep the map safe.'

Kei watched him leave. The Sprawl's hum sank in around him like a long, familiar chord. Outside, a distant beacon blinked in a pattern Kei thought he recognized — not a route, but a warning. He put his palm back to the glass and tried to hear the map's small, wired heart.